Blog Archives
Email marketing loses its edge
Once upon a time direct mail ruled.
You bought a carefully selected list; segmented it by geography or job title; crafted appropriate letters; packed them in an envelope together with a generic piece of collateral and posted them out to your target audience, safe in the knowledge that you would, by the law of averages, get a 0.5% response rate. It was expensive, but if you did it right you knew you would get the results which were measurable and traceable.
Then email came along and life changed beyond all recognition. Suddenly you could send out as many messages as you liked ‘for free’, hitting your database with more and more frequency. Open rates were 33%+ and the sales team was happy because they could tell potential clients about the ‘millions of hits’ in your advertising campaign.
But things aren’t looking quite so rosy these days. While event organisers and marketers maintain their love affair with electronic mail, the recipients are less enamoured. Faced with a barrage of messages on an hourly basis, potential visitors and delegates are learning to use the tools on their mail programmes to create rules that send messages from certain senders direct to their junk folder, or to flag them as spam so that they never even make it as far as the inbox at all.
Opening rates continue to fall, with an average marketing campaign now looking at figure of approximately 25%. From these the average click through rate is somewhere in the region of 4%, which means that for a mailing of 1000 people you can expect 10 to go through to your site, a response rate of 1%.
On the face of it, this still looks better than the 0.5% we expect from traditional DM, but this is not so. In the conference or event market the DM figure refers to actual bookings or registrations whereas the email click-through rate refers to clicks on any link in an email to any document or web-page. If we then assume that only 1 in 10, which is still very optimistic either books or registers then the actual response rate for an email campaign is only 0.1%.
Coupled with the fact that every time a database is mailed, it encourages individuals to junk or block the sender, a campaign that is poorly targetted and irritatingly frequent can actually create a double negative of failing to deliver response while actively turning potential customers away from the event.
Does this mean that there should be a return to DM? Not really. But it is time to reflect on a more holistic approach to marketing. Using social networking techniques and creating communities that are engaged rather than annoyed.
Publish and be damned…
So said Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, when the courtesan Harriette Wilson threatened to publish her memoirs and his letters.
Well last month I did publish a book. Not one that you would be interested in as it was a yearbook for my daughter’s classmates at school, but the process indicates just how far as an individual you can divorce yourself from mainstream business.
With a pretty good knowledge of page layout on Word, a few hints and tips from the publishing website, and a quick trawl of other people’s efforts online, I was able to create 64 pages of homage to the 60ish 11 year olds in her year. I managed to convert it to a pdf file and after a few attempts load it to the website. I used a wizard to create the cover and hey presto it was done.
I ordered one and 8 days later, a hard copy that wouldn’t look out of place on a bookstore shelf arrived through the post from the US where the website I used originated and the printing took place. Amazing. Even more incredible was that if the book had been commercial I could have assigned it an ISBN number and had it listed on Amazon just by checking 2 extra buttons.
Which got me thinking. Here is yet another business where the customer is taking control. Suppose you think you have a great novel, you can write it, employ a freelance editor to go through it for you, typeset it and publish it without ever having to go through the angst of trying to get an agent and a publishing deal.
Yes the professionalism and marketing clout these guys will give you is impressive, but there are books that started small, got picked up by someone online and suddenly they are big hits. And lots of publishers these days seem to think that all people who read books are interested in are the hurriedly written biographies of minor celebrities or teenage footballers.
With online technology delivering so much across geographical boundaries, it is so important for companies to change the way they market themselves and do business, particularly in the B2B publishing and events sector. Doing the same thing they have always done is simply not enough, because some of us are already doing it someplace else.
hellen @mission control
Getting connected
con·nec·tive (k
-n
k
t
v)
adj. Serving or tending to connect.
n. One that connects.
Clever organisations are already engaging in connective marketing: joining all of their activities together into a seamless strategy that encompasses all of their internal, online, mainstream media and live communications.
It’s such a simple idea that it’s hard to understand why it is such a new concept. Why is bringing all this activity together so difficult?
Perhaps it is because events are often seen as an adjunct to, or separate from, the main marketing activity, or that online is so sophisticated that it can only be handled by a specialist agency.
But technological advances mean that this is no longer the case. Platforms that enable live events to be knitted into the very fabric of online activity are now available; social media can be tied into conferences and disparate workforces bought together to exchange ideas and proffer solutions.
Creating connections has never been easier.
